Federica Barcellona is a multidisciplinary artist who for over thirty years has explored the female body as an expressive language through performance, video art, photography, and experimental theatre. Her work moves between social dimension and inner inquiry, transforming everyday spaces into territories of reflection and artistic action.

Research on the Body and Theatre

Since 1990, her research has focused on the body of the actor-performer, drawing on intensive studies in experimental theatre: Grotowski, Brook, Barba, and the Movement Technique of Fedora Aberasturi. In Bologna, in the early 1990s, she founded an all-female group with which she created experimental productions dedicated to the feminine sensibility and the expression of the actress’s body.

In 1996 she graduated from DAMS with a thesis entitled “Il ballo flamenco gitano come espressione artistico-sociologica” (Gypsy Flamenco Dance as Artistic-Sociological Expression), and left theatre understood purely as spectacle to seek out other spaces in everyday life — spaces without identity, spaces of passage. She developed self-moving installations in which environmental installation and body interpenetrate.

Video Art and Audiovisual Media

From 2000, the audiovisual medium entered her creative process, allowing her to involve the social environment in the making of the work and to operate on two parallel levels of elaboration. With the growth of the internet, the scope of involvement expanded creatively into a continuous dialogue between performance and various media: body, video, music, photography, and objects interweave to narrate a journey.

Cinema and Direction

As a director and screenwriter, she has produced cinematic works that have participated in international festivals. Among her best-known pieces: the short film Cane Blu (Italy) and Volo Nero (presented in Italy, China, Libya, India, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Venice), the latter both as video art and as public performance.

She received a special mention at the Premio Nazionale di Teatro Totale for the screenplay “Figlia dell’acqua” (2004).

Photography and Visual Art

As a visual artist, Federica exhibits internationally with solo shows in European museums and galleries. Her photographic series — including Intensity Mapping, La bellezza è nella carne, Potnia Theron, and In piedi — investigate the female body, violence, memory, and identity.

Her works have been acquired by the Archivio dell’Autoritratto fotografico of the Museo di Arte Moderna di Fotografia (Musinf) in Senigallia, and by the video archive of the Departament de Igualtat e Nueva Ciudadania in Sabadell (Spain).

Curatorial and Social Projects

Federica is the founder and president of the Associazione Passo Blu International Art Communication, through which she develops artistic projects with a strong social impact — among them Graffi A Mente: an artistic-social performance against homogenisation, carried out simultaneously in Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, and Spain.

Training and Teaching

She continuously develops her professional training with Michele Margotta (lifetime member of the Actor’s Studio in New York), Danio Manfredini (a master of the contemporary stage), Yuko Kaseki (leading butoh dancer and choreographer), and at the Centro Jerzy Grotowski in Pontedera.

Since 2023 she teaches Film History and Creative Graphics at the Istituto Onnicomprensivo Valle Scrivia. She has worked as artistic director of art galleries in Barcelona and Genoa, and as operations manager of the Museo Luzzati in Genoa.

Selected Exhibitions and Awards

2017

• Performance: A Vast Expansion of Burnt Skin, Refugees with Us, ContemporArt Villa Piaggio, Genoa

2016

• Performance, Installation, and Video: 13 Shebat 5776, Secret Traces of Memory, Torre Grimaldina, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa

2015

• Performance and photography exhibition “Volo Nero,” Noc Guimaraes Festival effe-EUROPE FOR FESTIVAL

2014

• Performance: Volo Nero, Corpi Identitari Futuri Experimental Film and Performance Art Festival, Palazzo Albrizzi, Venice
• Short Film: Cane Blu, Experimental Film and Performance Art Festival, Palazzo ‘Ca Zanardi, Venice

2013 

• Photos and videos of the performance “Red Shoes” at the Plastic Passion Ge Festival

2012 

• Photography exhibition “In piedi”, Vision Quest Contemporary Photography, Genoa
• Photography and video exhibition “Volo Nero”, Art Window Gallery, Barcelona (solo exhibition)
• Performance, exhibition, and video “Volo Nero”, Galleria Studio 44, Genoa (solo exhibition)

2011 

• Video performance and musical installation *Suicide by Society*, Studio 44 Gallery, Genoa

2010  

• “Slowly” Photography and Video Exhibition, ArtWindow Gallery, Barcelona, Spain (solo exhibition)
• “Aspetto, Mitologie femminili” Photography and Video Exhibition, Primo Piano LivinGallery Contemporary Art, Lecce